Have you ever been in this scenario: you are in a rush and need to find a file that you know the name of, but can’t remember where that file lives? You search the file browser in Bitbucket directory after directory… and finally find that elusive file.

When you’re looking for something in your DVCS projects, you want find it fast. We set out to make file search better, simpler, faster.

Meet the new file search

We’ve made it incredibly easy to jump to the exact file that you want to find or to search more broadly. From any repository page, simply press F and the quick file search dialog will appear.

Bitbucket uses a variation of “fuzzy” searching, meaning you can enter the query “aui src .js” and we’ll return all files with the extension .js in the /aui-sandbox/src/ directory. If you’ve ever used Sublime Text’s or TextMate’s Command+T file search, you’ll feel right at home.

There are a few additional tricks baked into this feature as well. Here’s a quick rundown of what else you can do with fuzzy file searching:

But not just in one repository–how about all my repositories? THAT would be helpful. I may know the name of the method, but not the class it belongs to or the file it’s hidden in. I may know the name of a method my method calls, and need to discover how I called it (say an API I rarely use), but don’t know which project (repository) I used it in. That’s why a grep is valuable.

This is fantastic! Although, we could make even greater use if we could search old commits. Recently, a file was lost in a commit somewhere along the line. I had to go through old ones before I was able to find it (because it didn’t exist in the current state, so I couldn’t use this search feature). Could this be a possibility for the future?